MARY CARR
AS LEADER of 1.2 billion Catholics across the world, Pope Francis is familiar with family dynamics and intergenerational friction. But, even so, I can’t say I envy him his visit here. Well certainly not the civic part, where it appears he’s obliged to attend a private audience with the country’s greatest secular saint Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and, heaven forfend, a banquet with, among others, our high priestess-in-waiting Culture Minister Josepha Madigan.
For it has become painfully obvious in recent days that our public representatives are itching to take on the Pope and set him straight on a few burning issues.
The only silver lining for the Pope as he faces into the headache of taming infantile tantrums while keeping the proverbial show on the road is that Elder Sister Mary McAleese has excused herself from the formalities, promising to throw herself into the gay Pride celebrations instead.
Good on the Government you might say, the time of unquestioning obeisance to any authority, let alone the Vatican, is well and truly over. The thing is, though, that the Pope is not here to bless one of the last outposts of traditional Catholicism, as was the case in 1979.
This time the country is merely a backdrop to the main event, which is the World Meeting of Catholic families. The State is providing security for our distinguished guest and the Government’s meeting him is a courtesy, the same that is extended to any religious leader who is here on their Church business, or a visiting head of State.
It’s a bit bizarre then that our parliamentarians are eagerly joining the queue to challenge the Pope on the timeless tenets of Catholic orthodoxy, instead of treating him as he should be treated, simply as an honoured guest, particularly given the progress our politicians have made in decoupling the State from Church power.
The removal of the baptism barrier in schools, the marriage equality referendum and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, which flies in the face of the most fundamental church teaching, shows that religious faith is increasingly becoming a private matter while the country embraces the human rights legislation of a modern secular state.
The relative silence from ecclesiastical figures during the Repeal referendum, when it was largely left to lay organisations like the Iona Institute to beat the antiabortion drum, showed an acceptance from the clergy of the new order. Yet that courtesy has not been extended in the reverse with a hands-off approach from politicians towards Catholic Church affairs.
IF ANYTHING, the appetite of attention-seeking politicians to tackle the Church on the flimsiest of pretexts seems as voracious as their silence on the barbarism and misogyny of other more, let’s say, volatile religions is assured. Josepha Madigan’s support of female ordination may chime with most Catholics’ wishes and, while she is perfectly entitled to express those views and press for them as a member of the laity, if the separation of Church and State is to mean anything, then she cannot leverage her ministerial platform to attack the Church.
She owes her invitation to the Dublin Castle banquet entirely to her ministerial office and, in that capacity, she has no business tackling him about female ordination. That she appears game to give him a piece of her mind shows an astonishing mixture of arrogance and naivety.
The same for Leo Varadkar who waded into the row between his minister and Archbishop Martin about female ordination, with his crass comments about equality in the workplace.
Taking potshots at Catholicism wins adulation in the echo chamber of the liberal chattering classes with little risk of censure from a Church that has been roundly cut down to size and grown timid.
Indeed the furore created by Archbishop Martin’s outburst against Josepha Madigan can be put down to the novelty of the hierarchy publicly defending the Church.
Perhaps it also signals another turning point in Church-State relations where it’s no longer politicians who demand the separation of powers, but a once-illustrious Church which feels hounded and demonised for its doctrine.